Ziggurats were mudbrick temples designed to bridge heaven and earth, anchoring religion, power, and architecture in the ancient Near East for thousands of years.

A ziggurat (also spelled ziqqurat) was a raised platform with four sloping sides that looked like a tiered pyramid. Ziggurats were common in ancient Mesopotamia (roughly modern Iraq) from around 4,000 ...

Centuries of excavations have unearthed a few theories about what really brought down one of the oldest cities in the ancient world. Alamy Chronicle's illustration of "Joshua at Jericho." Jericho's ...

A 15th-century manuscript shows trees bearing (clockwise from top left): sweet apples, jujubes, lemons, cherries, dates, and sour apples. By 7,000 years ago, people in New Guinea were cultivating ...

A young woman buried in China’s Tarim Basin some 2,000 years ago went to the afterlife accompanied by the height of fashion. The woman, who was wrapped in a felt blanket and buried in a coffin ...

The home of Georgian Jews represents a major crossroad for multiple cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious communities. Human histories and fates that intersected at this juncture had shaped each ...

My quest for the ark of the covenant was abruptly disrupted at 35,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean. Three hours into our flight to Israel and several hundred miles south of Greenland, the pilot ...

Off the coast of Marseille, National Geographic Explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau hauled up thousands of ancient clay vessels—and showed what fantastic discoveries modern scuba gear made possible. This ...

A small town on the coast of Cyprus was destroyed in an earthquake in the early 4th century. Archaeologists beginning in the 1930’s started to excavate the town of Kourion but two of them died from ...

Restoration efforts at the Church of Saint Philibert in France led to the discovery of a forgotten staircase and a 400-year-old burial vault. The archaeological finds didn’t stop there, with experts ...

The archaeological site at Turkey’s Boğazköy-Hattusha, the former capital of the Bronze Age Hittite empire, is a hotbed of ancient languages. During excavations of the ruins, archaeologists uncovered ...

The town of Port Royal is located at the mouth of Kingston Harbour in southeastern Jamaica. It was a major 17th-century English port city. A devastating earthquake in 1692 submerged much of the town ...